The Beaver
Feb./Mar. 2010
This is your last opportunity to buy The Beaver or, more precisely, the magazine that has called itself The Beaver for the last 90 years. Starting April-May, the glossy bi-monthly will sport a new, more prosaic moniker: Canada's History. Whatever the title, the magazine will continue to be "vibrant, intelligent and relevant." At least that's the promise of editor Mark Reid.
Certainly there's lots of good stuff in this issue, including Chris Nikkel's article recapping the history of two silent movies lensed in the Canadian Arctic circa 1920, one of which still stands as a classic, the other now almost entirely forgotten.
The classic is Nanook of the North which Robert Flaherty shot on Hudson Bay in 1920-21, using money from Revillon Frères, for 200 years a rival fur company to the Hudson Bay Co. Critics hailed Nanook as a masterpiece upon its premiere in New York in mid-1922, and Flaherty went into the history books as the first full-length documentary filmmaker.
Fate, by contrast, has been much less kind to Romance of the Fur Country. Shot in 1919 by H.M. Wyckpoff to mark the HBC's 250th anniversary, the film had its world premiere a full two years ahead of Nanook, in May 1920 . Unfortunately, this was in Winnipeg, the HBC's then-Canadian headquarters. It subsequently travelled to London, only to disappear from view. Selected footage is housed in the British Film Institute but there are no known complete copies.
The Walrus
March 2010
Seems like old times at The Walrus in this issue. Not old times as it pertains to The Walrus, of course - the magazine is not even seven years old - but as it pertains to Saturday Night.
Until its demise in 2005 Saturday Night was, hiccups aside, the longest-running magazine in Canadian history, having been founded in Toronto in the late 1880s. The March Walrus is a reunion of sorts of three of Saturday Night's most stalwart alumni. There's John Macfarlane, who was that magazine's publisher from 1980 through 1987 and now The Walrus's editor-in-chief and co-publisher. There's Robert Fulford, whose editorship of Saturday Night spanned 1968-1987. And there's Gary Stephen Ross who was Saturday Night's last editor, and before that a senior editor and contributing editor.
Fulford and Ross contribute an article each. Fulford's is about the weight-loss program he joined in 2008 (cost: $1,875) and, after dropping 50 pounds in just seven months, is still enrolled. Ross's is about his adopted city of Vancouver which he really likes - and not just because cosmetic surgeons there pioneered the use of Botox. "[The]city is anything but the kayaking, navel-gazing, pot-smoking Lotus land of popular imagination," he writes. It's a "grand civic experiment" where "leading-edge thinking elsewhere is often the norm here." At the same time, he doesn't ignore its deficits - not enough culture, a weak professional sports scene, no major civic square, too much chat about restaurants.
Geist
Winter 2009/10
If the word "quirky" didn't already exist, it would have had to have been coined as the le mot juste for Geist, a quarterly mix of fact, fiction, photography, reviews and illustration that's been published out of Vancouver since 1990.
You just never know what you're going to get in Geist. The latest issue is no exception and, as ever, it's best just to flip forward and backward through its pages, "relaxed [but]paying attention," as David Crosby once sang. Eventually, you'll settle on something.
What first caught my eye here was a black and white photo of editor Saeko Usukawa taken in 1948 when she was just a tiny perfect two. Usukawa, who died last year at 63, is posed and poised on the knee of a man in a Santa costume, his huge white-gloved hand gripping her right shoulder. It's a wonderful, haunting picture and if I was philosopher Roland Barthes, I could probably tell you why, but I'm not. So why don't you check it our for yourself on page 10?
Another pleasure is author Edith Iglauer's remembrance of a semi-disastrous sightseeing trip of Vancouver that she attempted with the renowned pianist Craig Rutenberg in the fall of 1997. The trip coincided with Vancouver's hosting of the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation conference. The city was turned into a labyrinth of barricaded roads and off-limits venues. Eventually, the two retreated to a Costco where Rutenberg bought shaving cream, toothpaste and a toothbrush and Iglauer sampled "the best pickled herring I have ever had."